Thursday, August 14, 2008

Face it, the produce that's flooding in from the garden belongs in a steaming bowl of minestrone: Zucchini, tomatoes, basil, arugula, onions, crookneck squash, potatoes.But who wants a steaming bowl of minestrone in 80+º weather?So it suddenly came to me. Minestrone Salad.Purely conceptual. But we put it into reality, and, yum.The beans were not from the garden; a nice handful of plump white beans cooked to tenderness with a pinch of salt and a rockin' bay leaf from our plant. (UPDATE: I forgot to mention the carrots, also purchased. Sliced, and gently cooked with the onion.)Everything else was nanolocal, even if some of it was grown last year and preserved in the freezer, namely the basil/arugula pesto (oh, disclosure, the walnuts and garlic were grown by somebody else, and the cheese, though local, is not from my yard... and the olive oil too).You take the basic elements of minestrone, cook them ever so slightly in the case of the squash and onion (fully in the case of the beans and potatoes, and completely raw in the case of the tomatoes), and then you toss together a chunky salad of still slightly warm ingredients with a little pesto thinned with olive oil and vinegar, seasoned with hotly mild chile powder. One thing we didn't add was fresh oregano leaves, but that might have been nice.Very molto. Gonna do it again.

I have to jump in here RIGHT NOW and say that I just Googled "minestrone salad."I am not the inventor of this, it seems. And upon thinking about that, of course I'm not.This is just my take on it.Still. I thought it was pretty cool.

What a great idea. Since your version is the first I've heard of it, you will always be the creator to me!!! Looks wonderful. I have a few zephyr squash that need to get eaten along with some limas..so looks like a southern minestrone salad may take place in tennessee!!

Who She?

I live a couple of miles from the Marin County Civic Center Farmers' Market, which feeds my little blogging hobby. Hell, it feeds me, too.
Formerly employed, I'm now a bum. Happy bum. Tomato ranchin' bum.
But I'm still mad.